Coudal Partners | Jewelboxing
Infrequent Mailing
No. 21, January 14, 2006
The previously promised puzzler (a la Einstein's Fish) is still being tested in Michele's logic labs. Once it's diabolocal enough, we'll send it out with a regular style Infrequent Mailing.
In Pursuit of Nothing
Skip over this whole next thing if you're just looking for a cool offer on Jewelboxing or the next contest. Those are at the very end.
Dear Reader,
Susan and I have developed a method for getting to the heart of a design problem. At least for CP, it works just about every time. There's no 'critical path' to follow. There's no magic mission statement (ugh) to compare sketches against. It's not about making a list of pros and cons. Nor thumbtacking a wall full of magazine pages, color swatches and screenshots. We don't make concept boards or matrixes of 3" x 5" index cards, nor assemble demographic, ethnographic, psychographic or any other kind of graphic profiles. We just do this.
We screw around for a while and then we start throwing things away until we're done.
The short essay, What We Talk About When We Talk About Work covers some of this ground. In essence our methods are subtractive rather addititive. It's why Josef Muller-Brockmann and Stanley Kubrick are heroes. It's why we love whitespace and simple geometric compositions. Hell, it's even why The Pixies are important. It's the application of craft in pursuit of the simplest, most focused communication of an idea. But, this isn't really about work. Last week, while on a lazy Mexican vacation with my family, something occured to me.
What's good for design is good for life.
Maybe it should have been obvious to me right along. Maybe I should have figured out years ago that worrying and overthinking and trying to keep up with other guys is all a distraction from the simple essential stuff. Maybe you all know this already, but nobody ever told me. Or at least I never listened if you did.
It's so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day and take an "if I can only do this one thing then I'll be happy" attitude. That of course never works. I recently read a draft of a new book by Dan Gilbert that contained, among many other things, the following thought.
The reason we are so often unhappy is because we don't set our goals for the people we will be when we reach them. We set our goals for the people we are when we set them.
I have an irrefutable proof for this theory. You'll need a young child. A son or daughter is preferred, although a brother, sister, nephew or niece will do just fine. Even that funny-looking kid that lives next door is acceptable. Now sit with them somewhere comfortable and quiet and think about your own life while you read them Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree.
See how you are?
I'm not quite sure how to resolve this with the fact that I'm at the studio on a Saturday, writing this as a way to procrastinate from working on a project has to be done on Monday or the world will end. But so be it. I do however highly recommend a long string of days doing nothing but reading John LeCarre novels while your three kids gradually turn brown in the sunshine and your littlest one learns to swim on Wednesday and then does 21 laps (the short way) on Thursday. That's a very good method for coming to terms with what's important. Like deciding what's for lunch. Or which makes a bigger splash, the cannonball or the can-opener.
Jim
An Offer: Spin Around
If you present yourself to others by putting your work and your soul on a disc, then maybe you ought to put that disc in something nice and custom. Start today with Jewelboxing. Write to crew at jewelboxing dot com with the words "I'm Round With a Hole in My Middle" in the subject line and save $25 on a 100pack of Kings or a 150pack of Standards. Offer ends Friday, January 20th.
A Contest: Transit Maps
On ongoing obsession at CP is finding the beauty in practical information design. Send a note to info at coudal dot com with the subject line "station to station" and in it include a link to a city transit map that best combines utility and beauty. We'll publish the nicest ones at Coudal and choose one of those at random. We'll send that person Muller-Brockmann's Grid Systems in Graphic Design, Kubrick's Barry Lyndon and the live Pixies disc of their choosing.
Yours always,
The Coudal Partners Crew.
PS: If you haven't already, take a few minutes (eleven actually) to watch our short film, Copy Goes Here.
